Building Cars With Small Teams

This video
about the Ariel
Atom is fun to watch. This would be a great car to drive. The
best quote from the video: "anyone who wants to know what a car
should be should drive one of these."

The reason I mention it here, however, is that the Atom is built by a
small
team of seven people. It's easy to see how a small team can
develop software, but the conventional wisdom is that to manufacture
something like a car you have to have a big organization.

I chose the word "manufacture" deliberately in the last paragraph
because this isn't a one-off racing car, which are built by small
teams, but a car you can order and buy.

Manufacturing something like a car requires intense specialization of
skills. So, how is the Atom possible? It still requires lots of
specialization, but in the same way that a small programming team
outsources a lot of specialization by using open source tools or
buying hosted Web services, the Ariel team has outsourced things like
building the engine (it uses a Toyota engine).